


To Enter in These Bonds

by oubliance



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: F/M, Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 00:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oubliance/pseuds/oubliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'I thought it would be neat if I got pregnant, it would hurry things up. But - there you are - can't get him into bed.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Enter in These Bonds

**Author's Note:**

> For madamedarque, who requested the wedding night.
> 
> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)

_My mine of precious stones, my empery,_  
 _How blessed am I in this discovering thee._  
 _To enter in these bonds, is to be free ..._  
-'To His Mistress Going to Bed'

 

I.

Lucile opens her eyes in the near-dark. She feels sick, head heavy on its cushion.

Looking carefully around the room, she sees her husband sitting on the floor, close by the stove.

She says his name: ‘Camille.’

Camille turns his head towards her. At the same time he pushes the candle into view, a light hitherto shielded by his body.

It’s as if he has said: let there be light. Lucile is surprised by his expression. She watches him bite his lips together and thinks he looks on the edge of an inexplicable despair. No hint of pleasure now in a wife won at last, his entirely.

Even though Lucile has been yearning to touch him, month upon month, he seems for a moment to be spun from air and water. Perhaps he is not a man at all?

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Are you very disappointed?’ The tone of her voice is unnatural; it saddens her.

Camille smiles. ‘No,’ he says.

Lucile can’t think what to say next. Surely it’s still his turn: one word isn’t much. They might be married – she catches her breath – fifty years. She can’t do all the talking, and Camille speaks eagerly enough when he wants to, stammer or no.

‘You could have woken me up,’ she suggests.

‘You were tired.’

Lucile pushes the cushion aside so that she is lying flat and wonders if he might be frustrated, only he does not seem it. Would I know, she thinks, if he were?

‘Claude will never let me have enough wine to practise with,’ she says.

‘That,’ Camille says carefully, ‘Is over now.’

She rises to her feet: queasy, heavy, blurred. Camille’s distracting eyes look up at her like black water. Or like eyes beneath black water, she fancies, stilling a shiver. Nonetheless she moves with definite grace. Most woman stand like that once or twice in their lives: for Lucile it is already routine, if not yet instinctive.

‘I’ve never seen so many people weeping in a day; not even at funerals,’ she says, crossing the room to where her husband sits.

Why is Camille on the floor, now that he possesses chairs? Lucile can’t answer this: neither can he.

 

II.

She is allowed to touch him now. No one can say her nay, but she doesn’t know how to begin. Lucile wonders: ought we to go into the bedroom? Her husband looks up at her and says nothing.

‘Camille,’ she says again. ‘You know better than I – ’

‘You don’t look well,’ Camille says. ‘You’re pale.’

Suddenly she presses his soft upper lip with a finger. Camille touches the back of her hand, and Lucile trembles, because for a moment it seems that the touch cannot be his: that someone else is in the room with them. Then she realises that she has only felt one man’s hand brush hers – her father’s, long ago – and that her body has mistaken Camille’s touch for a woman’s.

‘Let me see,’ she says, and takes his hand in both of hers, standing up straight and still in front of him. She begins to learn it: the sore place where the pen presses hour by hour, the narrow nails and tendons.

Georges-Jacques Danton said once that Camille was little but fierce – then laughed his head off, though nobody else understood the joke. Now she thinks of him saying that and summons a picture she has made for herself a thousand times: Camille speaking to the crowd, guns pressed into his grasp. And then leaves, ribbons and blood. What if he’d fired? What if a gun had simply gone off, just like that, in the hand she is holding now?

Lucile finds two freckles on the outside of his wrist; on the inside, a pulse bursts against her fingers with each heartbeat.

‘Are you scared?’ she says.

It’s supposed to sound funny, but does not. Indeed Lucile would like to know the answer, because why on earth should he be frightened? If anyone has cause for nerves –

‘Oh, yes,’ Camille says. ‘After all – ’

She waits for him to go on, stroking his thin fingers.

‘Lucile.’

He’s having trouble with his voice. ‘You look pale,’ he says again. She does: he guesses that she has a bad headache.

‘So what? You’re always pale.’

‘We – ’

She can’t, surely, have spoiled things already? Even her mother in the worst of tempers gave them a round month to drive one another to lunacy, murder, a famous trial, irreparable disgrace.

Lucile releases her husband’s hand and steps back. Let the reluctant bridegroom explain himself, if he will.

 

III.

Camille reaches up and touches her silk waist gently, stroking the skirt before him. Unlike Lucile he has not slept, and it is nearly three.

Everyone but Robespierre believes that the sermon put him off balance. Yet in confecting his special blend of affection and admonition Bérardier did little more than stroke the trigger of a loaded gun. Camille has been overwrought for days: first ecstatic about the house, then terrified about the papers, and – it must be admitted – prostrate after his confession despite all preliminary vaunts.

No amount of patient rehearsal with Robespierre sufficed to calm Camille’s apprehension, and he watches his wife now through a veil of sleeplessness.

‘It’s better if you feel well,’ he whispers. He cannot bear that marriage should be, like so much else, a matter of convenience.

Camille can't remember when he last slept. By the time Robespierre arrived in the morning, bright-faced and festal of garb, the bridegroom was tearful, and talked of leaving Paris. Camille knows what to do: of course he does. But he doesn’t know what he ought to do. Is pleasure, he wonders, enough?

If she knows nothing, he can certainly satisfy her. He fiddles with her filmy sash: not undoing it, but twisting it round and round his fingers. The room smells of candle smoke and spilt wine, and he wants to rest against her.

His wife once more avails herself of the new permissions she has acquired. She touches Camille’s upturned cheek, warmed by the stove and very soft. She touches his black brows and lays her finger under his eye where the skin is dark.

What is one more night, Camille thinks, in a whole life? Even a short one. They’ve waited, already, a long time.

 

IV.

Camille begins to talk quickly, his face moving under her hand.

‘Your father looked unhappy. I was sorry for him, Lucile. I don’t think even the champagne helped much; but it helped me.’

‘Why did you need help?’

‘Oh, after the sermon. People watching. All that.’

Camille is affected, she thinks, her eyes drifting to the walls and the shadowy furniture. It wasn’t that bad. Then she looks at him again and has to swallow the rush of saliva in her mouth: a sudden, hungry love.

‘Max said to think of something else.’

‘And so your mind was elsewhere as you married me?’ Her voice smiles. She already feels, perhaps without much cause, like a powerful person.

Camille shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says, the word breaking on his tongue. ‘I couldn’t do what he said.’

She thinks of Deputy Robespierre’s neat fingers unfastening her garter. If hands can be seemly, his are.

‘Do you want to go to sleep again?’ Camille says. He feels very shy.

‘I’m thirsty,’ Lucile says. ‘Is there any water?’

‘I think so. I wasn’t paying attention.’

Lucile begins to laugh at his characteristic air of being newly-born. ‘I’ll find it,’ she says, turning away. The apartment is in good order and she thinks, I’ll keep it like this; as nice as this. Only a minute to find the carafe and pour a glass of water. She drinks it.

‘Would you like some, Camille?’ she says, watching him.

Camille shakes his head. ‘How should we be married?’ he says, and Lucile understands that this is an important question even though she’s not sure what it means.

Now Camille remembers the sharp brightness of her voice: how frightened he was, how frightened she was. The crude, technical sense. He’d thought perhaps –

Lucile says, ‘I supposed you knew. What would happen, I mean.’ She doesn’t want him to think she’s mistaken his meaning. This isn’t a conversation about tonight, she thinks. She wants to comfort him but can’t think how to.

Camille pushes back his hair. The crudest thing is keeping someone else in mind and he’ll have to if she expects –

‘It’s late,’ Lucile says. ‘Come on, now.’

She puts her glass on the table and walks towards the bedroom.

Camille follows her quietly, like a well-behaved friend.

 

V.

‘We’re married,’ Lucile says. ‘We’re married!’ Even seeing the bed makes it real. She stands quite still and for the first time watches Camille walk into the room and sit on the edge of it.

‘At last,’ she says. 'All that waiting and Claude’s objections, and the fuss over the papers. I was more than half-convinced something would happen today – or is it yesterday now?’

‘Yesterday. For a few hours.’

‘I thought someone was bound to fall dead in the aisle: maybe me. Or you’d get religion. Or somebody would stand up and say you’d married her ten years before – ’

Camille laughs and her heart feels like a bud breaking. She stands in front of him and cups his head: her permitted hands in the long curls.

‘Lucile,’ Camille says – very clearly, without stammering at all. Then he makes a little sound, half a gasp and half a sigh, and bends forward to press his face into her pink silk dress.

‘There’s wine,’ she says. ‘It’s sticky; Camille, you – ’

‘Could we get into bed,’ Camille says. ‘And – ’

His voice is muffled, but it hardly matters when no words will come into the mouth.

Lucile says, ‘You want to go to sleep.’ He asked her that, but if he does not want – he must want something. Lucile wants to say no: she wants to say, shouldn't I be asking you to wait, isn't this backwards?

Sleep is distant but even so, Camille assents. It’s not a lie: if he could sleep, he would like to do so.

 

VI.

And now Lucile must decide whether she will be a modest wife, whether she will be tidy, how many secrets she wants to keep. For the time being, the baths and basins are all in the next room, so she can leave and come back all ready for sleep, if she wants to. She can tell Camille a story, and say that before he even knew them she and Adèle spent two years in a convent school.

He probably wouldn’t believe it, but it might cheer him up.

Lucile does not feel maidenly, although she is a maid. And it would do no harm to begin right here, she thinks, would it? We are married. My hair, at least –

When her dressed hair is undressed, it does not trouble her too much to unfasten her sash and her dress. All that sticky silk, danced in and spilt upon: she’s glad to see it go.

She keeps the shift. After all, she is only twenty, and her husband older.

Camille is playing with one of his long curls, pulling it tight round one finger and then another. He listens to her pouring water into a basin in the next room. I’m not acquitting myself well, he thinks. Although it could be worse, much worse.

Her breasts are beautifully cream and of a piece with her narrow body, interrupting the thin folds of her shift. She comes back into the room and Camille sees that the shift is splashed, damp. Lucile sits down and begins to comb out her hair.

Camille can’t make sense of a world where he lives here: with his wife, Lucile.

We are supposed to be going to bed, he tells himself. Camille’s ways are irregular and sleep has rarely been a choice. More often it’s a matter of fortune, good or bad, and rank coincidence. Still, even Camille has removed his own clothes on occasion.

He undoes his neck-cloth and drops it onto the bed, then the buttons on his waistcoat and then the shirt-buttons. He pushes them off his shoulders and sees his hands shaking, and Lucile watching him closely.

Lucile can’t keep away now. He’s still sitting but she has never seen a man’s bare chest before. Camille’s ribs jut out over a hollow stomach and his nipples are almost violet, pink-tinged, small and sharp in the cold room. She stops near him but doesn’t put out her hand. Not yet. Lucile is careful to do nothing wrong: even if it would no longer be so.

Camille lets her look, as he’d let anyone. But for the betraying hands he can disrobe mechanically enough. He takes off his stockings. He stands and unfastens breeches, drawers, pushes them down and steps out of them.

He knows what he would do with almost any other person, but not with her. He can’t play the coquette to his own wife, nor the wicked boy. Nor the practitioner of arts. Camille is looking at the floor and half a minute has passed. That’s a long time to stand naked in your bedroom. Lucile says nothing. But she’s a virgin: so she can’t, he thinks, be disappointed?

Lucile wants to say, I don’t understand what made you so lovely. She feels giddy just from looking, and for the first time it’s a relief that he doesn’t want to touch her yet.

‘You need a nightgown,’ she says. ‘So do I. Here, Camille – ’

It’s his turn to leave, and hers to watch the leaving.

 

VII.

Camille biting his lower lip, in linen, at the bedroom’s threshold, looks like a virgin saint. What a trick, Lucile thinks: what a falsehood. How he can stand there like that, adrift and wide-eyed – she cannot fathom. What sort of bargain has she made?

She thinks of wrapping her white-clad arms around him: embracing him unbrokenly. She’ll lose her fingertips in the hollow at the base of Camille’s throat and kiss his closed, impossible eyes.

Lucile wants to say, haven’t we waited enough, Camille, please. But she remembers catching butterflies with a net. Those summers at Bourg-la-Reine, the air was full of wings and colours –

‘We should go to sleep,’ she says.

Her own audacity was the sole limit placed on what she might do, where she might go, how many bright winged creatures she’d capture by nightfall. Brave enough to climb the wall, Lucile? To follow the river and hide under the bridge? Lucile never shows fear.

And now she is free again, on the other side of girlhood.

‘You don’t pray, I suppose,’ Camille says.

‘Not these days. Why, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Do you read? I read, sometimes.’

‘Not in bed much. Georges-Jacques does – ’

Lucile stores this up to examine later on. She’s learnt how useful knowledge is, and Danton often seems to have the advantage of them both: she supposes Camille must tell him everything.

Against Camille’s bare feet, the floor feels cold. Thanks to the dowry he will never have to beg his father’s money again, but the new nightgown is chilly too and he shivers.

His wife says, ‘You must get a dressing-gown. You’ll catch cold.’ Camille can tell she’s trying out the words, playing one sort of wife or another.

He gets carefully into their bed.

Lucile circles the room. She blows out one candle, then another. One remains. As the flame wobbles Camille tells himself, I remember being afraid. I am not afraid now. He closes his eyes and feels the bed shift as his wife’s light body lies down in it beside him. There’s a soft puff of air and the self-made darkness deepens, becomes real.

‘Goodnight, Camille.’

‘Lucile, I – ’

‘No, it’s all right.’ She finds his hand in the bed and squeezes it gently. ‘Camille, I’m tired. I really want to go to sleep.’ And now that the room is dark, she finds her words are true.

Camille turns over onto his side, towards her. Lying solemnly on his back felt wrong, but this is better. The pillow is soft under his cheek and he thinks, I really don’t know how I ended up here.

He listens to his wife breathing. At first she is self-conscious, aware of every sound she makes, even the sheet’s quiet rustle when her leg moves. Camille hears the pattern of her breath changing and lengthening. He opens his eyes and looks into the dark. Her face is only a few inches away. It’s not, he is relieved to find, like sleeping in another woman’s miscellaneous bed.

When will he sleep? Not for a long time, perhaps. Or maybe very soon, in the comfortable, exhausted dark and the rhythmic ebb and flow of healthy breath.

**Author's Note:**

> There might be a sequel at some point as I'm not sure this answers the spirit of the original request, though I did try.


End file.
